Hello, This portion of the blog contains an archive of my readings and thoughts for an Instructional Technology Studio (Design) Class (6190). I will not be updating this portion of my blog again, but will leave it online as an archive of my writings. However, do feel free to check out all of the other parts of the blog. 😉

Dr. Orey and others,
I am interested in your response to a project management journal done using some sort of journaling/blogging tool. I originally chose to use blogger because it was free and I didn’t have to setup anything (so it is something that any student could use). I could have easily set up a journal utilizing a different software [note: and I migrated to wordpress recently –2007].

One thing that I was hoping was that people would give me deskcrits [feedback] via the commenting feature of blogger. Only one person did, everyone else emailed me, although the give a desk crit goes to blogger. I’m not sure if that was because it was different from everyone else, people just preferred email, or something else.

I think one of the things that seemed to cause some confusion with my project is that people expected it to be instructional. I also sensed this with some of the other projects, too.

In general the response to my project was very positive, but I also think that people do not realize how hard it is to work with CSS or what my site really did. Some of the problems that I encountered (getting the flash to work properly in firefox, formatting without tables…etc.) involved code trickery of one sort or another. I spent alot of time on ‘code junkie’ sites reading about the various problems and solutions.

I think there are few people in studio (at least in 6190) that even realize why CSS is important or what it does, which is troubling to me as I see CSS as an important part of the future of the web. It is also the reason why I developed the alternate style sheet so that people could see CSS in action. CSS is also, to a certain point, part of the whole drive towards web based standards. Of course, I could have perhaps explained this better in either my project info or in the showcase.

To sum up, I really learned alot with my project. I’m glad I got to use Flash and learn it, but to be honest the accessibility and compliancy issues bother me alot. Yes, Flash is cool and definitely seems to be the ‘hot’ development tool at the moment.

Although I think all of the Blue Socks winners definitely deserved their awards, it did bother me that all of the winners were entirely Flash, with the only exception a hybrid html/Flash site (‘walk to rhythm’). I do not know if that is typical or exactly the criteria used to judge the Blue Sock awards, but it would seem to me that accessibility should be part of the discussion. It has bothered me off and on (sometimes more, sometimes less) than UGA seems to be moving away from web compliancy and standards — or at least, it seems some parts of the website would be of little use to those with disabilities or even very slow modems .

Michael’s timely post to the listserv about accessibility and providing written transcription of audio components of websites was certainly relevant, but there is also the other side of it: text reading/audio web transcription of websites for the site impaired.

Perhaps categories for the Blue Sock award would be useful, because a site that is completely ADA and W3C Compliant is probably not going to be the prettiest.

Hi Robin,
I enjoyed looking at your project, especially your photographs and galleries. I like the fact that you brand your photos, and how you’ve explored options for changing the style
sheet on the fly. I wanted to start learning CSS this semester and found that it over-taxed my brain — it is just a very different way of thinking! So, I cannot begin to know how you managed to do it! I like how your flash piece integrates
with the the look and feel of the site, and would maybe like
to have one fewer color block element in the blue theme —
maybe the violet on the left side which is very close in value
to the blue that is used for the link blocks. I like the colors and the background image in the blue theme, but the green theme colors seemed to be placed or used in a way that better conveys structure and hierarchy. If that makes any sense.

I also agree with some of the other comments you have received that it would be nice to have the opening flash piece freeze on the title a little longer before going into the gallery.

Thanks for sharing your site — I would really appreciate any suggestions you could offer on my 6190 project.
Thanks!
Lauren

Cool stuff, I’m impressed! This is an excellent example
of how to make a table-free website. (Thinking about peeking
behind the scenes to learn more about that!) I like your colors,
photo series, and layout. You’ve also included wonderful project
and spiral resources.

Here are some quick comments for you:
Opening page flash: When the spiral swirls down
and the title appears, could you let the title stay
there for a bit longer? Maybe a few more beats, so
there’s enough time to read it.

The navigation looks very professional. Again,
wonderful use of color! It would read better
if you could separate the spiral project work
from the support stuff. The “*links behind” bit was
lost on me, I tried to click it for more links. Maybe move
project resources and the * items to the very
bottom, separate them from the rest with a larger break,
and take out the * explanation. The other part of this
is the a:hover view, this would be
better if the treatment were consistent
(swapping the background color,
underlining, whatever you go with). I’m partial to the
blue navigation, it seems much more put together
than the other (although, I like having the
options between styles).

The mini photo gallery jumps from the
other layout, (with the red borders and spiral bkgd)
and does not accept the green style. It would be good
if this matched the other project pages.

Now that you’ve learned about CSS — have you played
around with making your own templates for Blogger?
A challenge: make your blogger pages match the
look-and-feel of your project pages.

Oh, I just looked at your code — I’m so excited to
see the unordered list driving your navigation!
I saw A List Apart in your resources, have you
looked at Listamatic? http://css.maxdesign.com.au/index.htm